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After completing the secondary school in Hamburg, he studied civil engineering at the Technische Hochschule in Stuttgart, and physics, mathematics and philosophy at various universities, including Berlin, Erlangen, Göttingen and Munich. Reichenbach was active in youth movements and student organizations, and published articles about the university reform, the freedom of research, and against anti-Semitic infiltrations in student organizations. Reichenbach himself was of Jewish ancestry.

In 1920 Reichenbach began teaching at the Technische Hochschule at Stuttgart as Privatdozent. In the same year, he published his first book on the philosophical implications of the theory of relativity, The Theory of Relativity and A Priori Knowledge, which criticized the Kantian notion of synthetic a priori. He subsequently published Axiomatization of the Theory of Relativity (1924), From Copernicus to Einstein (1927) and The Philosophy of Space and Time (1928), the last stating the logical positivist view on the theory of relativity.

In 1926, with the help of Albert Einstein, Max Planck and Max von Laue, Reichenbach became assistant professor in the physics department of Berlin University. He gained notice for his methods of teaching, as he was easily approached and his courses were open to discussion and debate. This was highly unusual at the time, although the practice is nowadays a common one.

When Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany in 1933, Reichenbach was immediately dismissed from his appointment at the University of Berlin under the government's so called "Race Laws" due to his Jewish ancestry. He thereupon emigrated to Turkey, where he headed the Department of Philosophy at the University of Istanbul. He introduced interdisciplinary seminars and courses on scientific subjects, and in 1935 he published The Theory of Probability.

Reichenbach helped establish UCLA as a leading philosophy department in the United States in the post-war period. Hilary Putnam, one of the major names in Western Philosophy during the latter half of the 20th century, may have been his most prominent student.

Reichenbach died in Los Angeles on April 9, 1953, while working on problems in the philosophy of time and on the nature of scientific laws. This work resulted in two books published posthumously: The Direction of Time and Nomological Statements and Admissible Operations.

1931. "Ziele und Wege der heutigen Naturphilosophie." English translation: "Aims and methods of modern philosophy of nature" in Reichenbach (1959).

1935. Wahrscheinlichkeitslehre : eine Untersuchung über die logischen und mathematischen Grundlagen der Wahrscheinlichkeitsrechnung. English translation: 1948, The theory of probability, an inquiry into the logical and mathematical foundations of the calculus of probability. University of California Press.